Word concreteness as a moderator of the tip-of-the-tongue effect

The tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT) is a universal phenomenon in which a speaker cannot fully produce a word that he or she believes will eventually be recalled and could easily be recognized. The purpose of the current experiment is to determine how variables such as word concreteness and word frequency influence TOT rates. Participants were shown word definitions that varied (low vs. high) on the basis of concreteness and frequency and were provided with the opportunity to report the corresponding word. Low-frequency words produced higher TOT rates, as previously reported in the literature (e.g., Harley & Bown, 1998); however, the current study is the first to demonstrate that words with low concreteness also lead to higher TOT proportions.